Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, both CIA intelligence analysts, openly discussed the work they are doing (without giving away the detail, obviously) on Intellipedia. Sean was a great, enthusiastic presenter, who was definitely a great choice for the conference – a great walking ad for the intel community.
Built as a multilayered collaborative platform, Intellipedia consists of several tools and layers, from Unclassified that can be accessed via dial-in (and presumably VPN) through to the Top Secret JWICS. They have a number of tools, including internal blogs, TagConnect (a del.icio.us equivalent) and video (the “CIA’s YouTube”).
Shared across the US Intelligence Community, Intellipedia and it’s siblings are, unlike Wikipedia, all 100 per cent attributable in their content – every creation and every edit is directly attributable. This approach was recommended for any enterprise; an idea that I consider to have considerable weight.
While Intellipedia is run on the same MediaWiki platform as Wikipedia, Sean made it abundantly clear that it was less an encyclopedia and more of a location for open discussion of intelligence topics. They are massively bought into the real value of collaborative tools inside the wall and have a number of tenets that assist their ability to get their message out.
There is a strong push to really adopt usage across the analyst community, not so much mandating use, but making non-use difficult.
Material is organised topically not organisationally as you would if you were Google searching. If an article exists on the Unclassified Intellipedia, and higher classified material exists, links to title-matched pieces are in the Unclassified article. Don spoke of the idea of “teaching search and teaching people” to find things. Smart.
The community work hard to replace existing business processes; encouraging use of Intellipedia as a platform instead of organising, aggregating and communicating elsewhere in a channel-based medium, such as in email. Andrew McAfee’s SLATES was mentioned by Sean as a foundation for this approach.
Blowing apart the “these are for young people” argument, Don made it very plain that this is not a generational issue. Intellipedia’s top contributor is a 61-year-old analyst with 40 years of intelligence community experience. Newcomers of any age are mentored into use by experienced users (what a great idea!). There has been a massive shift inside the CIA. As an example, there is massively reduced use of PowerPoint as people produce pages usable as a presentation on the Intellipedia platform! Indeed, Don and Sean’s presentation was an Unclassified Intellipedia page.
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